Advice on buying External Hard-drive

BOBS

Morning All
Just want a wee bit of advice on what I need to look out for. My DD is a keen photographer and has 6/7 sd cards with all her photographs stored on them. I really dont want to keep buying sd cards and am thinking she would be better storing photos on an external hard-drive (? correct me if I am wrong) and reusing sd cards.
If this is what she needs can one of you advise what to buy .... she has a basic MSI laptop.
Thanks
ETA would this be a possibility
http://goo.gl/17wuN0

getmore4less

need something for backup anyway

How much data does she have now? add up all the cards she has

hotukdeals is one place to look to keep an eye out for deals

there might be a cheaper usb2 only drive around.

where have you been buying the cards, prices can be double from some sources.

bsms1147

There are only three harddrive manufacturers and their failure rate is essentially the same, so for the most part go on price.

Opt for 2.5'' ('portable') over 3.5'' ('external') for laptop use as it's more convenient.

The price difference between USB 2.0 and 3.0 is becoming negligible. If your daughter's laptop has USB 3.0, use it. If not, consider opting for USB 3.0 anyway for better speeds in future use as her next computer almost certainly will have USB 3.0.

In terms of size, depends on how much she will use and your budget. A 1TB drive will be in the £45-50 region (the drive you have linked is half that size for a similar price).

And whatever you buy, buy two of them.

BOBS

getmore4less wrote: »

need something for backup anyway

How much data does she have now? add up all the cards she has

hotukdeals is one place to look to keep an eye out for deals

there might be a cheaper usb2 only drive around.

where have you been buying the cards, prices can be double from some sources.

she has approx 150gb
I only buy card when they are on offer.
Whats a usb2 ?

Thanks

BOBS

bsms1147 wrote: »

There are only three harddrive manufacturers and their failure rate is essentially the same, so for the most part go on price.

Opt for 2.5'' ('portable') over 3.5'' ('external') for laptop use as it's more convenient.

The price difference between USB 2.0 and 3.0 is becoming negligible. If your daughter's laptop has USB 3.0, use it. If not, consider opting for USB 3.0 anyway for better speeds in future use as her next computer almost certainly will have USB 3.0.

In terms of size, depends on how much she will use and your budget. A 1TB drive will be in the £45-50 region (the drive you have linked is half that size for a similar price).

And whatever you buy, buy two of them.

brilliant advice - buy why 2 ?

bsms1147

BOBS wrote: »

brilliant advice - buy why 2 ?

So that you have two copies of everything.

Many people will advise on backups, and especially if your daughter is a keen photographer and doesn't want to lose her photographs.

Harddrives and SD cards will fail, the backup means that the data is not lost should this happen. Whether you choose to backup to an online service ('cloud' services), another harddrive, CDs/DVDs, flash memory (SD cards) etc, is up to you. But I would recommend a backup of some sort.

googler

BOBS wrote: »

brilliant advice - buy why 2 ?

If you copy photos from multiple SD cards to one drive, then re-use the SD cards, and that drive fails, you've lost the photos altogether.

If you copy the photos to two drives, and one fails, you still have the other copy, but -

If you copy the photos to two drives, and keep them in the same place, and some physical disaster affects both drives (flood, fire) you've still lost the photos.

Multiple drives ideally should be in different physical locations. How seriously you take this depends on how important your data is. I used to work for a large financial concern, and the mainframe data backups were cycled regularly between three locations (in the days when data cartridges were used). If you/she feels the photos important enough to keep, consider swapping two backups between your house and someone else's.

Bigger and bigger drives are great, but they do mean that more data is lost when they fail. SD cards may be small, but they have the advantage of spreading data out, so that if one fails, only a little data is lost

sax11

what OS are you using

some external drives - if usb 2.0 only take an absolute age to transfer data onto windows 7 systems - if you have usb 3 then there isn't an issue

wba31

I woudlnt recommend the portable ones, quickly get loose connections and become a nightmare.

Dont think "she's only got 150gb of photos so ill go low" as how many more photos will she take?

Does she wish to access photos from elsewhere? Western Digital do an external hard drive that plugs into your router (so accessible by laptop as long as it's on wifi) and can also be accessed over the internet, if showing off pics at a friends house etc...

bsms1147

wba31 wrote: »

I woudlnt recommend the portable ones, quickly get loose connections and become a nightmare.

I would argue that they are no more prone to becoming loose than 3.5'' drives, they are after all the same connections, and in theory with one fewer cable to plug in the risk is halved compared to 3.5'' drives. The problems arise if you continually transport them (loose in a bag, for example) with the cable still attached.

closed

doesn't the laptop have hard disk space?

external drives are best used for backup, not for masters, and there is nothing wrong with portable drives, the usb connection is the same